A Chat With October’s Profile, Peter Cobb, co-founder/senior vice president, eBags

CS: What are your hobbies away from work?
PC: I love to bicycle; if I have an hour, that’s what I’ll do. Working out, bicycling and playing golf. And I have three kids, so every nonworking hour, as I just e-mailed my wife, “What do you want to do tomorrow?” I’m going to get up and bike for an hour, and after that I’ll do whatever you want me to do with the kids. Working out, I love wine, and really, I love the Internet. Nothing is better to me than sitting in my favorite chair with my wireless and cruising Wikipedia. There’s a joke in my family that I can’t even sit and watch a movie without in the middle of the movie it’ll be about a certain topic and I’ll just have my laptop there and I’ll Wikipedia, you know, Thomas Jefferson. And they’re like, “Dad, what are you doing? Are you using Wikipedia again?”
I just love how the Internet brings this knowledge to immediate gratification, whether it’s information and knowledge or weather or restaurants or products, in our case, bags. I have three kids and two of them have iPhones before I even do. We’re training a whole segment of the population, meaning kids, that they can get it and they can get it now. And we as Internet retailers and catalogers need to understand … we better wake up and realize that expectations are increasing amongst the consumers out there.
I was shopping for something, and you know how they sometimes have catalogs and they say “expect four to six weeks delivery,” which used to be when I was a kid. Well, that’s just unheard of now. That’s now grounds for, “I’m not going to purchase.” I’m not going to wait four to six weeks, even if they ship it really in a week, but they give themselves that space for legal reasons. We ship within, really kind of a day. It’s gotta be out the door and on its way to the customer.